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hasn’t heard my prayers in years. But it’s to no avail. There is no divine intervention, no miracle that turns back the clock. Instead, there is just Sebastian and me and the wild agony that suddenly runs between us.
    Unable to bear the uncertainty anymore, I prompt, “So you gave him the money.”
    “Of course, I did.” He nods. “What else was I supposed to do? Let them come back and finish him off? Let them set fire to him in the middle of the Strip, like they promised? There was nothing else I could have done.”
    I don’t disagree. I know how the Mafia works—you don’t grow up in Vegas without a healthy understanding of what they do and how they do it. Protection money, racketeering, gambling, drugs, guns. In this city, it all runs through the mob. Getting mixed up with them—owing them money—is a really, really bad idea.
    “That wasn’t the end of it.” It’s a statement, not a question.
    “No.” He shakes his head and I reach out for him again. For the first time, it occurs to me how cold he is. How much it’s taking out of him to tell his story, physically as well as emotionally. Once it registers, I burrow into him, getting as close as I can before he starts with the final piece of the story. Or at least I assume it’s final—I can’t imagine that Dylan has much farther to fall.
    “By the time I’m done paying off his latest gambling debts, I’m pretty much tapped out. I have a few thousand left, barely enough to get me by to my twentieth birthday, when I get access to the next chunk of my trust fund. In a little under two years, he’d managed to burn through hundreds of thousands of dollars—and I’d let him. When I figured out that we were both responsible for what had happened—” He shakes his head. “It was a shit realization. I told him I had nothing left, told him I couldn’t do this for him again. He agreed, promised it wouldn’t happen again. The last thing I did on my way out of town was contact a Gamblers Anonymous program for him. Of course, the first suggestion they had was to get the hell out of Vegas, something Dylan seemed pathologically and emotionally unable to do.”
    He grabs hold of his glass like he’s going to take another sip, but it’s empty, so he ends up rolling it between his hands instead and staring off into the distance. My insides are churning now, my head is throbbing and I’m regretting making him tell the story. Regretting that I ever heard of Dylan, ever heard of Janet. Because Sebastian doesn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve what Dylan put him through and he sure as hell doesn’t deserve the rehashing I’ve forced on him.
    I want to tell him to stop before he says something I can’t ignore, can’t pretend away. Not because I think I’m going to blame him, but because I know I won’t. In this case, I know exactly who’s to blame and it isn’t Sebastian Caine, no matter what he’s been telling himself for the last decade.
    Not sure what else to do, I grab his face between my hands and kiss him. Hard. “Get it over with,” I say when I finally pull away. For both of our sakes.
    “I don’t hear from him for a while, but then I get a call a few days before spring break—and my twentieth birthday. He’s in trouble again, real trouble, and they’re going to kill him if he doesn’t come up with the two hundred thousand dollars he owes them.” He pauses, gets lost in his own head until sheer will alone drags him out. “I tell him I don’t have anything, tell him I’m as close to broke as I’ve ever been. But he begs. And for the first time since I’ve known Dylan, he sounds afraid. Even after he’d been beat up so badly, he’d been half-defiant, half-resigned. But in that moment, when I was standing in my dorm room in Boston and he was here, alone and in debt to people you should never owe money to, he sounded afraid.
    “He begged me to help him, begged me not to let him die. And though there was a part of me that was